Mensa Otabil - King of all the Earth
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Welcome to day number 34 of our 40 days of power. So Psalm 47, verses 7 and 8: «For God is the king of all the earth. Sing praises with understanding. God reigns over the nations. God sits on his holy throne.»
Psalm 47 is called an enthronement or an ascension psalm, and it’s called that because it establishes God’s throne or God’s rulership over the earth. In ancient Israel, it was also one of the psalms sung at the coronation of a king. When a new king was being coronated, they would sing Psalm 47 and other psalms to establish his rule and to remind the new king that he was subject to the King of kings, so he doesn’t think more highly of himself than he ought to. It’s a very powerful psalm.
The first thing I want you to note is that the psalm says God exercises his power in holiness. He sits on a holy throne, and that is very important. It means God does not exercise power capriciously. He doesn’t just throw tantrums. Everything God does comes out of his wholeness, completeness, perfection, or what we also call holiness. Many times when people become powerful, they become very capricious and very temperamental; they dispense power here and there, throw things about, and disrupt people’s lives because their power doesn’t have holiness at its base. God’s power has holiness at its base, and that is why God created man in his image and gave man freedom and free will. God’s power is exercised in holiness.
Secondly, God wants all nations to know him. He desires that every nation and every culture will come to know who he is. He wants true worship to come from the nations. He doesn’t force the nations, but he wants the nations to willingly come to know him.
Third, God wants the nations to praise him with understanding. God doesn’t want robots; he wants people who worship him with understanding. That means our worship must come out of our knowledge. As we grow in knowledge, in education, in science, and in technology, instead of knowledge taking us away from God, it should bring us to worship God. The more we discover about nature, the creation of God, the more humble we should become to honor the one who put it there in the first place. Isn’t it amazing? Scientists who see all this profundity of creation sometimes turn away from the Creator. How can you discover his world and not acknowledge him? Knowledge and understanding must lead us to faith in God because he put everything there in the first place. God wants us to praise him with understanding.
Fourthly, we must proclaim the Lord as the Lord of the nations, and that’s what we are doing this week. We are proclaiming the power of God. We proclaim God as ruler, as power, as the source of all power in every nation, over Africa, over every continent of the world, over Ghana, and over every nation. We proclaim God’s rule, his holiness, his power, and his dominion over every nation on Earth. We believe that when God’s people in every nation come to acknowledge him as the source of everything they have — source of their knowledge, source of their education, and source of their wealth — then we turn our knowledge, all our wealth, all our experiences, and all the advantages we have, and we put them at the feet of the Ruler of the universe, allowing him to rule over them and thereby use us as his ambassadors to touch the rest of the world for his glory. May the Lord’s rule be felt in your life, in my life, in our world, in our families, and in our churches. Wherever we are, we proclaim God’s rule.
Let us pray. Say with me, «Heavenly Father, your throne is holy. I worship you with all my heart and declare your praises to the nations, in Jesus' name. Amen. And amen.